Links From Blog Comments – Update
I promised an update to my blog comments test where I had 600 comments posted to 600 different blogs for a brand new site. My goal was to see 1) how many of the comments would "stick" (meaning the blog owner would not remove the keyword-targeted link from the comments) and 2) whether or not I would get any search engine value from these blog comments and links.
My gut told me "of course you will", since Google loves links and this was a pretty easy way to get more inbound links. Get inbound links it did, too. Yahoo! is currently showing 195 links into the test site. That's roughly 1/3 the number of comments made, but the reality is that many of the links Y! is showing are duplicates. The real number of successful comments with links is about 100.
Unfortunately, because so few of the links "stuck", the site didn't make it into Google's top rankings for the keywords I was hoping for. The site has only received 77 unique visitors in the past 3 weeks, and of those only 4 were from Google (the rest were from the blogs I had comments posted on).
I think the lesson learned here is that you can get quality in-bound links from blogs, and you can do so very inexpensively, if you're willing to do the work. Since only 1/6th of my comments were actually allowed to keep their links, and since the comments were very well-written, appropriate comments related to the posts, it seems that many blog owners just don't like to see keyword links in place of the "name" field and will promptly delete the comments or remove the link from the name.
However, once you find the blogs that do let you keep those kinds of comments, you can greatly reduce your workload by posting only to those blogs.
So on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give this method of getting links a 6. Worth the work, but only if you're willing to do the upfront legwork required to discover where your comments are worth posting.
Click here to learn how to find blogs that do not use the NOFOLLOW link-killing attribute.
Please post your thoughts and comments below.
